Saturday, April 13, 2013

Parashat Tazria-Metzora – Gossip

This week’s Torah portion is among
the least favorites of most modern day Jews. I’ve heard of B’nai Mitzvah being
rescheduled to avoid it, others who have had to use this portion for their
b’nai mitzvah bemoaning the misfortune of their birth dates, and students
excited to have an excuse to miss services today, so as not to hear it. It’s an
icky portion. With talk of body fluids, ancient discomfort with natural body
functions, and strange gross sounding skin diseases, parts of this parsha are,
as G-dcast declared, downright PG-13 (for those who don’t know g-dcast.com is a
great way for all ages to study Torah, with cartoon depictions of each
parasha), and many in this room today are not yet 13. This makes it a difficult
portion to talk about and really stay true to the text.

Even the ancient rabbis felt this
difficulty, and rather than talk at length about bodies and disease, much
commentary on this Torah portion is about gossip. Later in the Torah, in the
book of Numbers, Miriam is struck with the spots on her skin that are described
at length in this week’s portion after bad-mouthing Moses’s wife. From this,
the rabbis of ancient times decided that this disease must always be a
punishment for gossip. Jewish tradition has a slew of sayings and stories
condemning gossip, even calling it Lashon HaRa, the evil tongue or speech. But
we all do it. Even if we try really hard to be conscious of what we say all the
time, it is fairly impossible to never speak about other people sometimes.
Judaism teaches that even talking about people in a positive way when they are
not around is Lashon HaRa, because if you were to speak too highly of someone,
others’ expectations of them might grow to a point where the real person could
never actually live up to that, and still cause their embarrassment. And of
course, it should go without saying to never speak ill of others, particularly
if they are not around to defend themselves. Gossip hurts three people: the one
who speaks the gossip, the one who hears the gossip, and the one who is being
gossiped about. Although, obviously, we are not today struck with icky skin
spots every time we gossip, it is still bad for the soul, and can cause damage
to our friendships. Those we subject to listening to our gossip become
complicit in the act, and thus we are damaging their relationships as well. And
of course, when we spread information, whether truth or rumors, about others,
we are potentially damaging their reputations, embarrassing them, or setting
them up for future embarrassment, and none of that is any good for anyone.

In this week’s Torah portion, the
purification process to get rid of the disease and repent for the supposed
gossip is to leave the Israelite camp and spend some time alone. Alone, it is
not possible to gossip. Alone, one can considered the damage done, feel guilty,
repent to G-d, and find the right words to apologize to the others affect by
his or her gossip once he or she returns to the community. However, there’s no
promise that others will forgive the gossiper, and there is really no way to
undo the gossip. One old Jewish story goes that a man spread a rumor about his
neighbor and wanted to repent. So his rabbi told him to get a feather pillow at
the store, and cut it, dropping feathers out of the pillow the whole way home.
The next day, the man goes back to the rabbi to ask what happens now that he’s
done the pillow thing and the rabbi tells him, go back and collect the feathers
and put them back in the pillow. Of course, the man cannot do this, because
feathers blow in the wind and it would be impossible to collect them all and
make the pillow at all usable again. So, the rabbi explains, this is what
happens when you gossip. The words leave you and you can never retrieve them.
Hopefully, you can be forgiven by those you may have hurt in your gossip, but
you can never really take back the things you say. May we all find the wisdom
to know when to be quiet, and may we never hurt others with our words.